Workers World has closely followed the unfolding events in Russia and the former Soviet Union. The following are excerpts from writings and statements by WWP Chairperson Sam Marcy at key points in the struggle.
Feb. 20, 1992: "There was no foundation for capitalist democracy in the USSR. ... Full-scale bourgeois democracy cannot be artificially created by the Harvard whiz kids and errand boys and girls of the Pentagon and Wall Street who are now encamped in Moscow.
"The truth is that the giant oil companies of Western imperialism are ... carefully observing the situation, casing the joint, waiting for the appropriate moment.
"That will not aid the establishment of capitalist democracy but will strengthen autocracy, if not fascism itself. ...
"The imperialists are not out to aid what was the USSR — they are out to raid it. That is why the perspective must be posed correctly: Either it will end up in the resuscitation of the workers' state — a proletarian dictatorship of the Leninist type, with socialist democracy — or the chaos, the disorganization, the continuing dismantlement and vandalizing of socialist property will lead to a fascist dictatorship.
"... What remains is for the proletarian vanguard elements ... to organize for the struggle."
Dec. 24, 1992: "The ... element that is completely indispensable is for the Congress of People's Deputies to unequivocally assert that the ownership of the basic means of production is completely under the jurisdiction of the Congress and that the officials of the government, and in particular the directors of the plants, the offices and all the ministries have to be nominated and approved by the Congress.
" ... the Congress has to reassert its constitutional authority. ... [But] only the working class can supply the necessary impetus and momentum for a real change in the course of Soviet politics and economics. In a word, it is only the working class and its allies that can return Russia and all the former Soviet republics to a course of resuming socialist development."
March 1993: Yeltsin has "illegally and unconstitutionally suspended the Congress in a struggle over the pace of the restoration of capitalism in Russia, in particular the dismantling and privatization of state property. ...
"The crisis is not merely a constitutional one, not just a struggle for power between different branches of government. At bottom, it is a class struggle over who will own the property built up over years of socialist construction."
Last updated: 15 January 2018